A. Technical Field
The present invention relates to computer processing and, more particularly, to systems, devices, and methods to increase computational efficiency of estimating the strength of a relationship between elements.
B. Description of the Related Art
Booming online healthcare Question and Answer services puts the global online healthcare service industry is on a map to become a billion-dollar industry. As health-related websites, such as medhelp.org in the US and xywy.com in China, allow users to search readily available health-related information online, especially the younger generation increasingly seeks to educate itself about health issues prior to—and oftentimes instead of—visiting a doctor's office. While information from different online sources is not equally trustworthy, a recent report shows that tens of millions of health-related queries are searched every day on Baidu's search engine. The xywy.com website, for example, has millions of registered users and hundreds of thousands of registered doctors. In order to provide high-quality online healthcare services, the ability to extract co-occurring symptom and disease terms from online documents to determine the relation between a symptom and a disease is of significant importance. Therefore, in order to infer, for example, a likely disease from a set of given symptoms, it would be desirable to have systems and methods that can evaluate the relatedness of the co-occurring symptom-disease terms, while, at the same time, evaluating their trustworthiness as well as the trustworthiness of their sources.